On music...

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.
- Martin Luther

Music is the language of God created for the benefit of Mankind.
- Vishwa Mohan Bhatt

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.
- Martin Luther

Who loves not women, wine and song remains a fool his whole life long.
- Martin Luther

You know, we just buy music now. We don't make it any more. And that goes for just about everything. I think it's so important that people develop and subscribe to and have confidence in their own ability to make music, however rough it is.
- Tom Waits

Everybody should do some music. Every creature and every material has the music inside, it's its energy; music is actually very easy, there's nothing to it, and everybody should search for his own.
- Erkan Oğur

Music will take you through times with no money better than money will take you through times with no music.
- Warren Argo

Every man knows he is a sissy compared to Johnny Cash.
- Bono

One night I was sitting listening to some Hank Williams songs - and they'll change your life in a hurry...
- Charles M. Schulz

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
- Red Auerbach

Compare music to drinks. Some is like a strong brandy. Some is like a fine wine. The music you're playing sounds like Diet Coke.
- Luciano Pavarotti

We need a new Bad Brains to come and wash away all these rich white kids crying about their girlfriends.
- "sprimusp", on YouTube

If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.
- Charlie Parker

Money is only money, but a banjo is a *banjo*.
- Chris McGlone

I want another banjo. Sure, I own two banjos already, but the world is a sad place these days and I think extra precautions are needed.
- John Kavanagh

The banjo is the swiss army knife of the darkside.
- www.jakerock.com

Nothing says 'dropping out of society' like learning the banjo.
- Daniel Roth, Fortune magazine, January 21, 2002

Why I Play the Banjo
Tinkle, plink
Tankle, plunk
Aristocratic
Mountain Funk
Ancient Persia
Ivory Coast
Jingle, Fram
I likes it most.

- Rex, 11/12/2001

Once you allay their natural fears of becoming unpaid extras in a live version of "Hee-Haw", people will frequently listen to banjo music without resorting to violence.
- Peter Roehling

When you want genuine music - music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whiskey, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pinfeather pimples on a picked goose - when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!
- Mark Twain, "Enthusiastic Eloquence," in the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, June 23, 1865.

I have learned that there lies dormant in the souls of all men a penchant for some particular musical instrument, and an unsuspected yearning to learn to play on it, that are bound to wake up and demand attention some day. Therefore, you who rail at such as disturb your slumbers with unsuccessful and demoralizing attempts to subjugate a fiddle, beware! for sooner or later your own time will come.
- Mark Twain

When you are about 35 years old, something terrible happens to music.
- Steve Race

If singing the blues is a gift, I think I'd rather have a toaster.
- Bob Snider

Among God's creations two, the dog and the guitar, have taken all sizes and shapes in order not to be separated from man.
- Andres Segovia

There's just a few people that call themselves stars can actually sit down with a guitar and sing you a song.
- Merle Haggard

There's one thing I never did do, and that was stink.
- Merle Haggard

If I hear another line dance song I think I'm going to puke.
- Merle Haggard

Lonesome songs always appealed to me.
- Dock Boggs

You can sing the blues in church if you use the words right.
- Son House

You know, a spiritual song gets closer to me than the blues do... sometime.
- Fred McDowell

I have been offered a lot of money to play rock and roll, but I want change. I have also played against rock and roll band and I stole the show. Amen.
- Rev. Lonnie Farris

The blues is not a plaything like some people think they are.
- Son House

Blues isn't about feeling bad, it is about making other people feel bad.
- Harry Manx

Don't never follow you first mind, cause that's the one that's wrong. 'Cause the Devil beats God to you every time.
- Son House

Blues is for gut-bucket people who run around with only half their clothes on.
- Rev. Gary Davis

When I listen to old music, that's one of the few times that I actually have a kind of love for humanity.
- Robert Crumb

The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.
- Brian Eno

Music is music. Bach or the fat guy playing "oh Susanna" on his armpit at the block party every July fourth, it's all the same basic language.
- Pat Costello

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.
- Louis Armstrong

EVERYTHING by Michael Revoltin and Golly G could be annihilated from existence forever and not bother me in the least. This is music produced by blending a sedative with a laxative.
- Mike Curtis

The last thing that the blues needs is another smart-ass white boy with an attitude.
- Brownie McGhee

There are only three white blues singers, and Geoff Muldaur is at least two of them.
- Richard Thompson

There are only forty people in the world and five of them are hamburgers.
- Captain Beefheart

There are 100,000 marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.
- Harry Anslinger, testifying to Congress, 1937

never let your wife listen to live Albert King when you're tired
- Leonard Watkins

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
- Lawrence Durrell

I don't like no confusion.
- John Hurt

The reason I liked Charley Patton and those other Delta singers so much was because they were angry: Their music is ominous. Patton had a rheumatic heart and he knew that he was going to die young, which he did. In Skip James you hear a lot of sorrow, but also a lot of anger. In Son House you hear a lot of fear. When I first heard these guys I couldn't identify the emotions because I didn't acknowledge that I had them myself.
- John Fahey

If I made records for my own pleasure, I would only record Charley Patton songs.
- Bob Dylan

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ours, cause we don't give a darn. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.
- Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie was what folks who don't believe in anything would call an anomaly.
- Steve Earle

You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.
- Frank Zappa

Remember, Information is not knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom; Wisdom is not truth; Truth is not beauty; Beauty is not love; Love is not music; Music is the best.
- Frank Zappa

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
- Frank Zappa

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.
- Thomas Carlyle

I say to ya'll, there's 4 key elements in any good mountain song - drinking, cheating, killing and going to hell.
- Barley Scotch, lead singer of Hayseed Dixie

Music should never be harmless.
- Robbie Robertson

Wine goes in, the truth comes out.
- Harmonica Frank Floyd

If you don't understand it, don't mess with it.
- Louis Armstrong

Nothing is more beautiful than a guitar, except, possibly, two.
- Frederic Chopin

I'd listen to country when I couldn't do no better.
- Willie "Big Eyes" Smith

Ability to play the banjo soon places one in a social position to pick and choose from scores of social invitations. Everywhere, the banjoist is assured of a hearty welcome.
- from THE BANJO, 1927 pamphlet published by Gibson, Inc.

On computers and technology...

A sysadmin is either invisible or in trouble.
- unknown

There are 2 Kinds of O/S's: Unix, and brain-farts.
- Aaron R. Kulkis

I don't believe UNIX is Utopia. It's just the best set of tools around.
- Dick Haight, Unix Review, Jan. 1985, p. 117

BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War. It is based on a program called "xenix", which was written by Microsoft for the US government. These programs are used by hackers to break into other people's computer systems to steal credit card numbers. They may also be used to break into people's stereos to steal their music, using the "mp3" program. Torovoltos is a notorious hacker, responsible for writing many hacker programs, such as "telnet", which is used by hackers to connect to machines on the internet without using a telephone.
- T. Reginald Gibbons.

It's no sin to be ignorant, unless you have a web page.
- John Kavanagh

If there's one thing that the Web has changed about modern communication, it's that we've at long last done away with the archaic idea that publishing is the private playground of people who have ideas, experiences, and opinions.
- Lore Sjöberg, The Brunching Shuttlecocks

The virtual community? The word virtual does not mean "virtue." It means "not." When I go to the store and they say: The shirt that you brought in is virtually done. It means it is not done, in the same way that the virtual community is not a community. There is no commitment there. When you log off, you are not a member of it anymore. My flesh and blood community, the sense of knowing my neighbor, knowing the guy across the street, having dinner with the people down the block, getting along with each other and making compromises, that's a genuine community with a commitment.
- Clifford Stoll

UNIX has a philosophy, it has 25 years of history behind it, and most importantly, it has a clean core. It strives for something - some kind of beauty. And that's really what struck me as a programmer. Operating systems that normal home users are used to, such as DOS and Windows, didn't have any way of life. Nobody tried to design Windows - it just grew in random directions without any kind of thought behind it. [...] I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself; I just think that they make really crappy operating systems.
- Linus Torvalds

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as "users".
- Edward Tufte

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.
- Robert Firth

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
- Larry Wall

perhaps the strong desire in computer people for Computers to have a life is caused by our own lack of one.
- John Enzinas

Don't trust any computers that you can see over the top of.
- Scott Dorsey

When you get a woman, your .emacs goes to shit.
- Michael A. Petonic

I don't need to be enlightned. I have a killfile.
- Rob Campbell

Chicks dig webmasters.
- Rob Campbell

On love...

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.
- Rodney Dangerfield

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
- Nietzsche, as (mis)quoted by Matt Groening

She put carbolic in my coffee, turpentine in my tea,
Strychnine in my biscuits, Lord but she didn't hurt me.
- Furry Lewis, Big Chief Blues

[Wives are good] on paper, at least. until they turn into harpies with sharp claws and open check books. Then they're kind of frightening. And they put on all kinds of makeup and parade around the street with their shopping cart yelling "Sale on aisle seven!" at anyone who will listen. Their wooden clog sandals make a helluva racket on linoleum tile. Their plastic jewelry clatters like the bones of little children.
- Rob Campbell

Why should I marry when the man next door to me's got a wife?
- Furry Lewis on The Johnny Carson Show

Intimacy is for mortals.
- Robin Blondon

NO MAN who grew up watching the Flintstones would turn away a delicious, lovingly crafted, bag lunch. It's what we all aspire to and what most of us have given up hoping for.
- Rob Campbell

If you don't love others you can't cook. People who have no love to share eat poorly, and they don't cook. If you love cooking, you will cook, at whatever level. People who like to be around a table, who like to share, they'll try to cook, even if it's only an egg. I would much prefer to eat an egg with friends than caviar with strangers.
- Chef Philippe Legendre

You know the magic's gone when she says 'I'll go and change into something more comfortable,' and does.
- Chris Smith

I can't hate folks to save my life.
- Reverend Pearly Brown

I can't afford to hate anyone. I don't have that kind of time.
- Takashi Shimura as Kanji Watanabe in Kurosawa's Ikiru

You lose a lot of time hating people.
- Marian Anderson

Not forgiving someone is like eating rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.
- unknown

You who feel no pain at the suffering of others
It is not fitting for you to be called human.
- Saadi

There ain't nothin' in this world that's worth being a snot over.
- Larry Wall

On faith...

There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.
- John Calvin

The divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand.
- Caspar D. Friedrich

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or "existent": in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.
- Terry Eagleton

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.
-Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)

When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect?"
- Thomas Sowell

Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice (and those thoughts we aren't interested in), people don't speak their beliefs easily, or publicly.
- Edward R. Murrow

...[R]eligious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved [...]
- Barack Obama

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
- Mahatma Gandhi

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."
- Charlie Brown

[To] claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.
- Terry Eagleton

I think religion is best when it's reduced to a one hour television program.
- Rob Campbell

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.
- Richard Feynman

My faith is one that admits some doubt.
- Barack Obama

Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can. Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral.
- Richard Stallman

Put one dumb foot in front of the other and course-correct as you go.
- Barry Diller

On everything else...

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
-Dorothy Parker

What I say is, if a man really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.
- A.A. Milne

People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don't accept the world.
- Richard Stallman

I've got a home so much better
I'm gonna go there sooner or later
And I don't want to get adjusted to this world.
- Traditional hymn

Haste is of the devil. Slowness is of God.
- H. L. Mencken

I'm goin' down to the river, lord, lay my head on the ground
let the waves and the water, baby, wash my troubles down
- Traditional blues lyric, via Fred McDowell

Men might not be clean. They might even stink. But at least they're functional.
- Jason Burgess

There's a role for everyone in life, and "selfish asshole" is doing me just fine.
- Jason Burgess

You don't have to make sense if you're right.
- Curtis Chesnutt

I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're goin', and hook up with them later.
- Mitch Hedburg

Going to a Moebius strip joint, and hitting the Klein bottle
- ben fulton

People are stupider than anybody.
- Tom Lehrer

Fortunately I live in the southwest, so when I acquire a paunch I can cover it with a belt buckle the size of a hubcap.
- owhite@nmsu.edu

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
- Robert Benchley

Television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.
- Ernie Kovacs

I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.
- Groucho Marx

People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?
- Lemmy Kilmister

Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.
- W. Edwards Deming

Where's my damn blue soother?
- Rebekah Hutten, age 3

It smells like sewer! I mean, not bad sewer...
- Jason Burgess

I see good in everything, except the dark.
- Unknown

People teach their dogs to sit; it's a trick. I've been sitting my whole life, and a dog has never looked at me as though he thought I was tricky.
- Mitch Hedberg

If you can't sleep, count sheep. Don't count endangered animals because you will run out.
- Mitch Hedberg

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.
- Mark Twain

I got a curve so sneaky it might be your daddy.
- Satchell Paige

When it comes to sports I am not particularly interested. Generally speaking, I look upon them as dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.
- Fran Lebowitz

Nothing fazes me. I'm like some kinda Space man on his way to Mars with a big gun and a whole lot of coffee.
- Rob Campbell

My mother is a wonderful lady. I remember her best from those summers long ago. I was sitting on a swing wearing my little lace dress, mumsy pushing me higher and higher into the air causing my pigtails to fly like ropes about my smiling head. She kept pushing though and the cries of joy and excitement turned to terror. Her laughter became desperate as one of my little white shoes with the big pink buckles flew off into the pond, disturbing some honking ducks therein. Mother collapsed onto the ground and started sobbing, spilling her valium into the grass as my swing began its pendulum swing back to earth.

ahh summer.
- Rob Campbell

If the shoe fits, get another one just like it.
- Doug Barron

You know, old folks say, it's a long lane don't have no end and a bad wind don't never change. But one day, back when Hoover was president, I was driving my cart down Beale Street, and I seen a rat, sitting on top of a garbage can, eating a onion, crying.
- Furry Lewis